Hi guys!

I have a old (7 years) laptop which I use to run PCDJ. As I have never connected it to the internet, each song has been added the long by - by manually typing artist, title etc before ripping the MP3 from each disc.

However, I have realised that if I lost my computer, or if it went wrong, I could lose all this information and have to start again! As it has taken hours and hours over a few years, I would hate to start from scratch.

Also, as the computer is getting old and new laptops are getting cheaper, Im thinking it might be a good idea to move everything over to a new laptop at some point. (I realise that if I do this, I would probably need to remove everything from the old laptop to stay legal).

Therefore, my question is...... how would you recommend backing up my music collection (retaining title information etc, as well as the actual MP3's), and if I bought a new laptop how easy would it be to move everything accross.

As you can guess from my questions, computers are not my strong point!

Many thanks in advance, Mark.

I just moved to digital the back end of last year so still not totally confident in it but what I have done is bought 2 320gig iomega external hard drives that I keep identical they were £45 each from tesco direct
this may not be what your looking for but it works for me

You can buy a 500Gb external hard drive for about £50.00 at Staples, then just copy and paste. You can then use the external hard drive on any computer

Hi Falcom, many thanks!

I will have a look at external hard drives tonight. Are there any models anyone can recommend, or are they all the same. Is 500GB enough for the average dj?

Cheers, Mark.

I have 2 x Western Digital 500gb external hard drives. They work great, black, no buttons, nothing and just sit quietly in the background doing their thing. WD technical support was good, I had one query with an email response within 24 hours.

Cheapest will be to shop around online, dont forget to try Amazon as they keep surprising me with being the cheapest in many things other than books!

Hope that's useful and good luck

Teez

I have actually got three hard drives 2 x 500GB and 1 x 1TB. (All Seagate)

I use the largest to store all my albums and is connected to my home computer, i use it to make playlists etc. and then transfer to smaller drives which are identical.
I also use Traktor DJ 3 which can read all iTunes music folders.
So to put it simply i make all my playlists in iTunes which Traktor can then read and play.
The good thing about iTunes is you only need one original copy of a song but you can have it in 20 different playlists without using up more memory, it just links back to the original song . hope this helps

Just ordered a 500GB Seagate external drive - £50 inc P&P, thought I couldnt go wrong for that price and it gets 5 stars in the reviews too!

Right, now I need to spend some time getting my new CD's uplodaed and labled (see other post).

Thanks again, Mark.